


Kings and Desperate Men

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Choking, Clothed Sex, Clothing Porn, Dirty Talk, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, Father/Son Incest, Frottage, Impact Play, M/M, Medieval Hell Iconography, Past Henry IV/Richard II, Unhealthy Relationships, dream imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:55:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25513171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Henry tries to punish Hal for straying, but might just wind up punishing himself.
Relationships: Prince Hal (Shakespeare)/Henry IV
Comments: 11
Kudos: 13
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	Kings and Desperate Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



Alone in the echoing room, Henry watches his son. He stands before him, contrite, head bowed, his cheek still red from the slap and red as a brand. Struck dumb and struck senseless by the blow, perhaps, his quick and liquid words all stopped up in his throat and unable to depart. It’s good, Henry thinks to see him like this, even if shame and bile rise within him for thinking so. There will always be shame in his heart, because Hal is his son and his heir. 

Sometimes, Henry dreams about his son, sitting splayed and shameless on St. Edward’s Chair as he is crowned king of an England wracked by war and discord, flayed by Rumor’s many tongues. Everything he has done and everything he will do for England have been tainted by Hal’s conduct as surely as it has been by disease. In the dreams, Hal leans backwards in the ancient chair, as though he sits against a table in a tavern, and Richard’s crown is lowered on his head. For a moment he gleams, golden in the light of hope and sun, and the future, and then the dream pulls back. The light fades, and then rises anew, this time as hungry, grasping flames. 

Henry always wakes before the eager tongues of fire can lick up the chair, before the jaws of Hell can open beneath it and swallow down the ancient seat of kings. He knows how the dreams will end, because he used to dream the same things when Richard was king, though then it was Richard seated in majesty, smiling at Henry even as he was consumed by flames. Henry will go down to his death (and his death will be soon if the sickness keeps sapping his strength and stealing his vitality as it does now). He dies even as he breathes, and perhaps he will see heaven after he has done his time in Purgatory. But Henry wonders if he will ever purge his soul enough for Heaven, because for all that he has done, too many sins blot away all his attempts at good. The seas cannot wash the balm from an anointed king, and Richard who was king is dead and deposed, and Henry’s son will be king after him and sink the land beneath the weight of his shamelessness. In attempting to win back his birthright, perhaps Henry has doomed this England, this throne of majesty. 

Sometimes, when Henry’s hope deserts him in the long, sick nights when he cannot sleep and can only think of the motion of bodies writhing as they unify, he sees the hellmouth gaping wide in his dreams, and feels the press of sinners on all sides. Sometimes, Hal is next to him as they fall inexorably towards the flames, and he twists a hand in Henry’s in some perverse play-act of comfort, like a returning prodigal son at the end of days. Sometimes, Hal’s the devil with the prod, urging his father towards the pit as he smiles with his even teeth and his bright, mocking eyes. 

But now, Hal stands contrite and marked before him, dressed in clothing befitting a common tapster, not the Prince of Wales. He is ludicrous in such attire, a wanton youth before his father’s throne, Hal looks up at Henry with a quick, arch glance before returning his eyes to his pointed shoes, and Henry cannot decide which of his most secret dreams he would prefer to indulge in more: to slap all smugness from his son’s face once again, chastise him with rod and hand until his flesh burns as red as if it had been scrubbed, or to see him standing in innocent nakedness before him, humbled before his father’s will. But Hal is no prodigal son returned yet, and perhaps he will never be. Even when he wears the raiment of a king, he will still appear like some perverse mummer, a Lord of Misrule as lord over England. And Henry cannot bear it. 

“What would you have with me, Father?” asks his son, head still bowed, reddened cheek hiding behind an untidy fall of hair. 

“You are the Prince of Wales, and you will, from this day forth, bear yourself as such,” Henry says, and Hal has the decency to look attentive and obedient. 

“As your Grace commands,” Hal replies, automatic and a little mocking, and Henry remembers the feeling of Hal’s soft skin beneath the blow of his hand as he slapped the smirk from his son’s face. 

“You will,” he says at last, “return to me this evening as well. I wish for you to attend upon me.” 

He’s certain that Hal has many small responsibilities: a debt owed, or a promise to keep with his tapsters and thieves and all the other companions of his ignominy, perhaps. He’ll want to be getting on and getting out, still smarting as he goes to lick his wounds. Henry dismisses Hal with a wave of a hand, and returns to his worries and his churning mind. Hal glances back, and in that moment, in the hall’s jewel-like light, he smiles like an angel about to fall. 

*** 

In his bedchamber, the king lies alone beneath rich hangings, having dismissed his retainers and awaits his son. The milky light of a misty evening streams dully into the room, casting thin fingers of brightness onto the floor. They only make the shadows longer. Henry is not so ill tonight as he has been of late, so he relishes the quiet and thinks on something besides sickness. He meditates upon his son and upon the crown, lying there on its cushion at his bedside. There can be no one here, he thinks, as Hal enters the chamber on quiet feet. He steals into the room as Henry is sure he has stolen into many a chamber to debase himself. In the long and falling twilight, he almost appears as a penitent sinner, a good son who has returned to his father in his father’s hour of need. Is this not what Henry wanted, this returning? Or does he want another son entirely, who can live up to his expectations and keep the crown from collapsing in on its own weight. 

Hal’s dressed tidily now, his hair combed, dressed in a tunic cut at the knee and displaying brightly colored hose. There’s a sudden jolt of fire in Henry’s breast, that hell-flame he’s tried to suppress since Richard rising hot and shameful at the sight of his own son. Best to confess it then: Henry would take Hal him standing, kneeling, any way at all, were he not bound to him by blood. Perhaps he’ll ask for Hal’s body even so. It’s a terrible thing, this lust for the flesh of his body and for the flesh of a man, but he’ll indulge it anyhow. He has to, in asking for the obedience of his son. 

“What does your Grace require of me?” Hal asks. 

His face is smoothed again, once more unmarked by red, by hands, and Henry wants to mark him again. Hal will be his creature if he is anyone’s creature at all. 

“Come here,” Henry says, and Hal comes to the bedside, kneeling before his king, and Henry wonders if he’s knelt for anyone else, and let them put his barbed and biting tongue to different use. “And know your place.” 

If he were being cruel and honest, Henry would say that Hal does not deserve to kneel at his bedside, that he does not belong in Henry’s rooms at all, but the thought of Hal spread wantonly in rented rooms above a tavern sickens Henry in a gnawing, burning way that even the other sickness cannot manage to do. No one should see Hal’s body but to chastise it. It should not be worshipped, nor should it be writhed over in the twisting dance of lust. 

He rises, obedient, wordless, and quite unlike himself. 

“What would I be,” Henry said, “if I were not your father, do you think?” 

“Well, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” 

“No, I don’t think you would. Perhaps you would be Percy’s son.” 

_Or Richard’s_ hangs in the air unspoken, and both of them feel the chill of remembrance and reminder. Henry is king through violence, and Hal will take his birthright from this same violence, if he does not end Henry’s line. 

“And as Percy’s son, I would be rebelling against you, so it’s a good thing I’m not, isn’t it?” 

There it is. The sharpness of a young man who’s always known his place to be above his fellows comes through in Hal’s words. It’s the slip that Henry’s waited for, the pretext for penance and punishment. He thinks a quick and wordless prayer, a sort of _God forgive me_ , because he knows that no matter what else could have happened in this room lit only by the evening light, the only path is forward to an end that will consign his soul to the fire and the hellmouth. 

“And yet you rebel against me regardless,” Henry replies, and he looks to the crown, seeing Hal look there as well. In the darkness, the metal seems to glow. 

“I’ve promised that I won’t be wild forever,” Hal says. 

It’s not enough. It will never be enough for Henry until he can bring the rod to Hal’s back in while he bends over the throne. He would let heaven guide his hand as Hal lay across the throne with his hose undone and his points hanging untied, his tunic rucked up around his waist in a puddle of fabric. And he’d watch the flesh redden beneath the blows, chastising out any trace of lust until Hal lay helpless and whimpering across the throne. Barely a prince any longer. Certainly no heir. 

“Stand,” Henry orders. 

Hal does, rising slightly rumpled. The shadows have grown longer, purpling the dark fabric of Hal’s tunic to the color of a fresh bruise. He looks, for a moment, magnificent, like a king in waiting, and Henry cannot bear it any longer. He pulls Hal down to him, kisses his forehead tenderly, as though it is but a kiss of peace. Hal flinches, and Henry drags him towards him, back again. Their eyes meet, and Hal’s eyebrow quirks as if to hide the surprise so visible in his face. 

“You’ll do as I say,” Henry says, and is that eagerness he sees in his son’s eyes, or rage? He doesn’t particularly care to find out as he kisses his lips. 

Hal meets him where he is, and he kisses as though he’s hungry, and will never have a meal again as good as this one. His body’s warm and solid, and it rubs against Henry’s in a way that sets to motion all his lusts, firing Hell’s presence in his stomach, and perhaps the hellmouth gapes at him, but he will welcome it if this is to be his greatest sin. To kill a king and commit incest-- both are mortal weights, and both will lie guilty in his head for a long time, but he still reaches up beneath his son’s clothes to feel the warmth of his body even so. 

It’s easy to find the points of Hal’s hose where they tie beneath the tunic, and Hal pulls the tunic over his own head in a motion that belies reluctance. Henry pauses, concerned, and the heft of guilt weights thickly upon him. If he is to do this properly, it cannot be by force, he realizes now. And this feels like force, even if he sees that spark of interest in Hal’s wide eyes. 

“I would take you,” Henry says, “as you’ve no doubt taken your pleasure or been taken in every dirty room in Eastcheap, and if you’re a good and loyal son, you’ll like it well enough. Won’t you?” 

“How could I refuse my lord?” Hal says. There’s a mocking, bitter edge to his voice. “I have, as you said, lost my princely privilege with vile participation.”  
He’s throwing Henry’s own words back at him, and it’s more than Henry can bear. He rises from the bed slowly and with pain to grasp at the neckline of Hal’s tunic. Hal gasps as his hands make contact first with flesh and then with fabric as Henry pulls himself from the bed, rising to meet his son. Hal’s face reddens, and he gasps as Henry uses him to bring himself to standing. He lets go with a push, and Hal stumbles backwards, rubbing at his neck. He looks almost frightened. 

“You have done just that,” Henry says at last. His voice is too loud in the dark and empty room. “And you’ll be punished for it, and not with kisses or caresses or the welcoming embrace of a father. Stand up.” 

Hal stands, and Henry reaches for the place where his points tie to his jacket, unlaces them to leave Hal half-undressed and yet still clothed. Hal twitches under Henry’s touch, and Henry feels himself hardening in a way he only does now when he wakes from desperate dreams of Hell or of that moment once, in a a room dimmed by the soft shadows of an early summer twilight, when he thought he truly loved Richard, before his father’s death, before Flint Castle, before a man was murdered in a tiny room at Pontefract. He surges towards his son to claim his lips again. 

“Please…” Hal gasps, but Henry doesn’t let him plead as he guides him back to the bed, desperate with the heat of the moment, even in his weakened, sickened state. 

“I’ll not let you say a word unless it’s to pray or to ask for forgiveness,” Henry says, and Hal snorts, somehow managing to make it sound wanton, as if it’s all a ploy to drive Henry mad. 

He bends down to kiss Hal’s neck, and feel his son shudder against him, grab at him, try to pull him down. But Henry won’t be pulled and he won’t succumb to Hal’s touches now. He kisses Hal again in that same place, and smiles as he hears his son gasp. 

“Father,” Hal wails, all propriety forgotten in one last protest, but he meets Henry all the same, and allows his father to press him back to the bed, bare arse tilted upwards, as if ready for the penitent lash. 

Henry doesn’t have a rod or a scourge with which to chastise Hal, but he does have the stick he sometimes uses to walk, and that will do. Hefting it in two hands, Henry brings it down against Hal’s bare, displayed arse, and smiles at the sound it makes. This is sinful, he knows too well, and yet it is all that he could desire. He brings the stick down upon his son again, and Hal whines. So filthy he must be, Henry thinks, that even punishment’s a pleasure. 

Hal’s face is buried in the fine damask of the bedspread, and he tries to say something that sounds sob-choked, or perhaps pleasure-spent as Henry runs a clammy hand across the reddened marks his stick has left on Hal. They’re crisscrossed lines across his arse and on his thighs, above the sagging tops of his hose, and the sight maddens Henry, sends him thinking of a thousand things to do as he presses himself to Hal, guiding his legs shut so that he can rub himself against his son’s thighs. 

“I ought to use your mouth,” he says to Hal. “Make you put your sharp and wanton tongue towards better use in pleasuring a king instead of causing him distress. And I’m sure you’ve debased yourself with it enough already. But I won’t because what sort of king and what sort of father would I be if I were to shame my heir?” 

Hal barks out a laugh. 

“Probably the sort of king who’d actually fuck a prince instead of just rutting against him.” 

That’s all it takes to get Henry to press himself between Hal’s thighs, and feel the heat of his son’s body against his prick, as he takes his pleasure from him. Henry’s own cock brushes against Hal’s and he hears Hal moan, desperate and wild. It doesn’t take long after that for all things to come together into a strange, high point of connect, where it seems as though all memories are forgotten save for one of a summer’s twilight, and for this Hell-heated moment here, in a chamber devoid of others. Hal comes first, with a gasp, and then Henry’s pulling back to spend across Hal’s thighs and burning arse. He’s finally grown weakened with his exertions, and he finds himself swaying, until Hal gently helps him back to his bed. 

“You’re filthy, Father,” he says. “But you ought to sleep even so.” 

In the full-dark of evening, even sitting spent on Henry’s bed, Hal looks regal, and Henry feels a weight in his chest. Perhaps this has not been punishment enough at all. Or perhaps, if it is penance for Hal, this sin is punishment for Henry himself. 

**Author's Note:**

> Although it's not my favorite variant of the Henry IVs, I've borrowed some scene-setting and blocking from Hollow Crown, because that III.ii slap is inspiring. Shoutout to _Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries_ for helping me finally figure out how to describe hose, and to the class I once took on Gothic art that introduced me to and founded a lifelong fondness for hellmouth imagery. Hellmouths may be in the business of devouring sinners, but honestly, they can be kind of cute. Also helpful, although it deals with an earlier period and with religious communities, was the book _Dark Age Bodies_ , which helped a bit with the "oral sex is shameful for rhetoric-y reasons" undercurrent in this. 
> 
> Title from John Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud".


End file.
